Mode switching is obvious, but it’s not

One thing I’ve come to appreciate over time is how much perspective changes once you have sat on both sides of the table.

I’ve spent parts of my career wearing a CMO hat and parts wearing a CPO hat (HELP). I’ve been the acquiring company and the one wanting to be gobbled up. The consultant and the client. I am naturally analytical, but I’ve also spent a lot of time in untethered creative hemispheres. And more relevantly, I’ve been responsible for brand love, growth curves, funnels, and narrative, but I’ve also been responsible for product truth, support, edge cases, and user trust. That mix has shaped how I look at problems. And sometimes I take that for granted.

The thing I keep bumping into is that a lot of execution failures are not capability gaps. They are mode switching gaps.

Different objectives require different t-shirts, based on what you are optimizing for. And when great people evaluate the work in front of them using the wrong t-shirt, they do not make it better - washing the whites with the new denim jeans. This is not a capability gap, it’s a mode switching gap.

In marketing, the cleanest example is the difference between awareness work and optimization work.

Awareness work exists to create curiosity. It is designed for people who do not yet care. Its job is to simplify, frame, and invite. It is allowed to be incomplete. It is often intentionally imprecise. If it succeeds, it earns a few seconds of attention and a willingness to learn more later.

Optimization work exists for people who are already leaning in. Its job is clarity, accuracy, and trust. This is where details matter. Features, limitations, and edge cases matter. The next step has to live up to the promise that the previous step created.

Both are essential, but they serve different moments. Have you ever seen a product spec on a subway billboard?

I see the same failure mode show up in other places too. One that comes up a lot in product teams is the difference between an experiment and a no-brainer. Experiments are meant to explore, learn, and reduce uncertainty. No-brainers are meant to be executed cleanly and quickly. People regularly apply “prove it” logic to experiments and “let’s test it” logic to obvious decisions, and that creates a lot of misdirected energy.

Take the difference between an engineer and a researcher. People who have worn both hats think of solving problems as one fluid solution space, but many people are very strong at one and very uncomfortable with the other. Engineering optimizes for correctness and reliability. Research optimizes for discovery and insight. When you evaluate one with the standards of the other, you don’t get better outcomes, you just slow everything down and call it “rigor”.

There are open modes and close modes. Open mode is about generating possibility. Close mode is about refining reality.

Once you have lived in both, it becomes kind of obvious when simplicity is a feature and when detail is non-negotiable. But if you have lived primarily in one, you will naturally try to pull everything into your home mode because it feels safer.

In marketing, when we are doing top of funnel work to create awareness, the goal is not to explain dictation accuracy, language models, or formatting logic... the goal is to make someone feel that communicating with their voice might be easier than what they are doing today (and remember us in the future).

If we bring product completeness and over-explanation into that moment, we dilute the power of the message. The work becomes accurate but uninteresting, i.e.technically true and also emotionally flat. But once someone is considering adopting a product, excitement alone is not enough. This is where precision matters - clear explanations of how it works, where it works, and what to expect. If we stay vague here, we lose trust.

Try to do both at the same time? End up in a muddy middle that does neither well.

This gets emotionally loaded because awareness work can feel uncomfortable to people who care deeply about product integrity and existing users. It can feel sloppy or irresponsible because it does not account for every scenario. Detail is a badge of honor downstream. But that discomfort is often a sign you are judging the work with the wrong criteria. The job of awareness is to invite. The job of onboarding and lifecycle is to deliver. Mixing those responsibilities in the same moment creates friction for both.

Having worn a lot of hats, mode switching feels instinctive to me now. I know when provocation is useful and when it is dangerous (helpdesk tickets galore!). But I do not think this is innate. I think it is learned through exposure to both sides of the problem. And I think we under-teach it - at least I could be better at making this clear.

For people earlier in their careers, mode switching is rarely taught explicitly, especially in a time when we expect everyone to understand everything. As a result, many high-potential future leaders operate as if there is one correct way to approach work at all times, rather than identifying different modes for different moments.

The simplest leadership improvement I have found is just naming the hat. Wear the awareness hat for this. Wear the onboarding hat for this. Wear the experiment hat for this. Wear the execution hat for this. It sounds basic, but it changes how work gets judged, shipped, and understood.